throw a light on each other, and show us the reason of customs which before appeared inexplicable.
All this evolution is quite admissible, but it is important to restrict it to the populations with which it actually appears to be connected, and not to make of it a universal law, applicable to the whole human race.
VI. The Clan and the Family.
Independently of their intrinsic interest, the facts that I have so rapidly enumerated have a very wide bearing. Taken alone, they suffice to destroy altogether the generally accepted ideas as to the origin of human societies. The current doctrine, so often asserted, and manifestly inspired by the Edenic tradition of a terrestrial Paradise and by the memory of the Roman family, insists that human societies have always and everywhere started with the family, and by this word is understood the patriarchal family, essentially composed of the father and the mother, or at most the mothers and the children. From this first family, grouped submissively around one august chief, the father, similar families are supposed to have sprung, which, side by side, constituted tribes, cities, and states. This familial unit, supposed to be primordial, this "cellule" of societies, is held to be particularly respectable; the chief who governs it despotically, the father, has something enchanting about him. At his voice the celestial wrath bursts without mercy on the child bold enough to brave it. Even as late as the last century, the paternal malediction had the effect of a moral thunderbolt; in romances and theatrical plays the writers often had recourse to it in order to effect the catastrophes of their plots.
We are forced in the present day to renounce this traditional notion. We must bid adieu to the primitive patriarchate. The patriarchal, or even simply paternal family, does not date, at least in most cases, from the origin of societies.
The truly primitive stock is no other than the clan, that is, a small consanguine group in which the kinship is still very much confused. It was not in a day that the first
